Saturday, May 31, 2008

Good Cookies

The engineered blandness of "cookie cutter" suburbia always disturbs me, the same roofs, the same fences, sometimes the same colours. Whether it is due to overly restrictive regulations or just the higher cost of building anything that would be considered different, or the lack of desire to do so, all the new housing developments I have seen recently are tainted with the same taste of beige.

As with any form of production, it is cheaper to build multiple entities rather than one-offs, so why are there so few projects that push the boundaries a little while keeping the budget under control by increasing the numbers. Is it lack of interest and demand, unwillingness of planning department or just lack of imagination?

Here is one example of building to a consistent, yet original, plan that results in interesting dwellings that give buyers the opportunity to live in an interesting building without having to foot the bill for a bespoke home: ‘the cyclops’ hilversum, the netherlands, 2001 (photo by andrei thurlow)

Of course if every street looked like this we would be back at square one.